Slashdot Mirror
Twitter Sues US Government Over National Security Data Requests
mpicpp sends news that Twitter is suing the U.S. government to fight their rules on what information can be shared about national security-related requests for user data. Service providers like Twitter are prohibited from telling us the exact number of National Security Letters and FISA court orders they've received. Google has filed a challenge based on First Amendment rights, and Twitter's lawsuit (PDF) is taking a similar approach. Twitter VP Ben Lee says, "We've tried to achieve the level of transparency our users deserve without litigation, but to no avail. In April, we provided a draft Transparency Report addendum to the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a report which we hoped would provide meaningful transparency for our users. After many months of discussions, we were unable to convince them to allow us to publish even a redacted version of the report."
It's nice to see rich and powerful corporations starting to stand up and oppose these abuses...
Including names of all agents, cowards, morons or whatever they are called, "working" for the government.
Just say the documents must have been stolen or something. It's not like the government can say very much when their most secret of all secret agencies didn't manage to stop similar things from happening.
... doesn't mean the NSA won't do it.
By the way, have they admitted they've been tapping all your phone calls beyond the local exchange since the 70s yet?
All of them. Everywhere.
Inside the USA.
And you're worried about Facebook.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Can't tell you that. But we've bought 200 replacement pet canaries this year.
Have gnu, will travel.
The degree of secrecy demanded correlates directly with how unethical the surveillance is.
If it was limited in scope, with the targeted individuals having a real national security rationale for observation, there would be little necessity for the secrecy. The public reaction might be on the order of suspicion that a search warrant's criteria wasn't really present, but that isn't an intensity of response that is really problematic for the government.
It's specifically the concealed scale of the surveillance that is clearly most pertinent, and hidden by dire government threat.
If the interests of the citizens were what was of concern here, we would see little secrecy around the number of inquiries, and much more concern about specifics about the individual inquiries, ostensibly hidden to protect citizens' legal and privacy rights. Instead, we see the precise opposite. The broad -number- is what's obscured and made secret at every opportunity, while the specific targeted data and the legal actions taken from them (i.e. their actual usefulness for legitimate purposes) is an afterthought in terms of government suppression. This inversion alone should be enough to make clear whose "interests" these programs are intended to "secure".
The Twitter blog entry cited says that they are prevented from revealing the number of NSL & FISA orders received even if that number is zero. The text of the lawsuit explains that under the terms of the settlement in January between the government and Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft and Yahoo! (laid down in what the lawsuit calls the Deputy Attorney General's letter (PDF), companies are allowed to give either the numbers of NSL & FISA orders received and accounts affected but only in bands of 1000, of which the first is 0-999, or the total number of orders received in bands of 250, starting with 0-249. Is that what killed Apple's warrant canary?
... more in line with the relatively small number of non-national security information requests we receive." According to Twitter's last transparency report, there were 1257 information requests from law enforcement in the US, covering 1918 accounts. Does this suggest that Twitter receive about the same number of NSL & FISA orders?
Twitter want to publish more specific numbers, including zero. They say that "The DAG Letter cites to no authority for these restrictions on service providers’ speech" and argue that anyway the settlement doesn't apply to them.
A previous blog entry says Twitter want "to provide that information in much smaller ranges that will be
Why does the government object? After all, it's only metadata.